Bastian’s expression told me he hadn’t expected me to ask the question, which meant he hadn’t prepared a defense for something that went straight past politics into the personal cost he may have been paying.
Feral stilled beside me as he watched me work. He could see I wasn’t confronting Bastian. I was studying him in the same way I’d examine anything else.
“How long have you been going to the seal sites alone?” I asked. This was a guess on my part, but again, I was trusting my instincts.
Bastian’s eyes sharpened, but he didn’t answer.
I took that as confirmation and filed it with the rest. A pattern was forming in my mind, the edges becoming clearer even if I couldn’t see the whole picture yet.
“You’ve been performing the rituals since my father died,” Feral said softly, hitting the idea on the head.
Bastian’s growl rumbled through the hall, though I didn’t sense aggression.
“Your father kept those seals alive from the time he became alpha,” Bastian said in a much lower tone of voice. “You inherited a kingdom and didn’t even know what you’d been given.”
I heard weariness beneath his harshness, bone-deep exhaustion that had been collecting for years with no relief in sight.
“I watched him do it before he died,” Bastian said. “I saw the ritual and understood that it mattered. When you showedno sign of knowing what to do and instead spent your time on politics and dominance challenges instead of the old magic, someone had to step in.”
He believed Feral had been too young and untested to understand what mattered. Perhaps he hadn’t been trying to destroy the pack. He’d been trying to prevent its collapse while waiting for Feral to prove himself capable of taking over.
We may have read him wrong all this time.
His contempt was real, but so was his exhaustion. This wasn’t sabotage. It was a rescue attempt that had been failing for over a decade.
“What you’re doing isn’t working,” I said. “You were wrong to try.”
Bastian’s expression fractured.
“The duskburst won’t anchor,” he said, his voice going flat in the way people’s voices did when they were reciting facts they’d examined from every angle and still couldn’t solve. “I’ve tried everything. Soil composition, timing, moon phases, and different plant preparation. Nothing holds. So I’ve been pouring more of… whatever I can grab onto to compensate.”
His wolves must be affected too. If he’d been pulling from the territorial magic that connected shifters to their wolves, trying to fill gaps that shouldn’t exist, he was causing them considerable harm. This was the magical equivalent of holding a structure together with glue and will when what it needed was a foundation.
Feral’s face changed, the last of his aggression dissolving into understanding.
“You’ve been weakening your own pack by trying to fix ours,” I said.
Bastian’s silence confirmed it.
He gestured to his enforcers. “Bring food and drink. Take your time.”
They left, closing the hall doors behind them with a solid thunk that echoed through the empty vaulted space.
“Sit.” Bastian pulled out chairs from a table near the center of the room. Heavy wooden things, old enough that the seats had worn smooth from use.
We settled in the chairs.
Feral leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the table. “What do you remember of the ritual from watching my father?”
Bastian described what he’d seen. The seal sites, scattered across the territory at specific geographic points. The duskburst placed at those points in a careful arrangement. The binding words spoken at moonrise, old pack language that predated written records.
One alpha, moving between locations over the course of several nights, anchoring each site in sequence before moving to the next.
I listened, building a framework the way I built any complex theory. Something was missing from this picture, but I couldn’t name it yet. The ritual Bastian described made sense on the surface, and it fit the pattern of ceremonial magic I’d studied. But parts of the structure felt incomplete, like a formula with one component missing.
Acorn hopped up onto the table and gave me a pointed look.The greenhouse holds the bear who knows. Go find the root of where this grows.
He didn’t nudge without reason. His magic always pointed somewhere true. He’d done this since he’d chosen me when I was twelve and had needed guidance more than I’d needed power. While my cousins’ companions shared their magic, giving them enhanced abilities, Acorn’s gift was simpler and to me, more valuable. He showed me where to look when I couldn’t find the pattern yet.
